


Shadow of a Doubt

by my_mad_fatuation



Category: My Mad Fat Diary
Genre: Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, F/M, Implied/Referenced Self-Harm
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-10-11
Updated: 2017-10-22
Packaged: 2019-01-16 02:16:47
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 13
Words: 20,981
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12333444
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/my_mad_fatuation/pseuds/my_mad_fatuation
Summary: Nothing good ever happens to Finn. Not until Rae shows up, who is not like other girls...





	1. Chapter 1

Nothing ever happens to me.

Okay, that’s not entirely true. Nothing _good_ ever happens to me.

Even my seventeenth birthday, which should have been one of the best days of my life so far, brought me nothing but despair. The joy I felt upon receiving a Nikon D3400 digital SLR camera was quickly eclipsed by The Event.

The Event, of course, was my unceremonious dumping by my girlfriend of two years. Although, “unceremonious” doesn’t quite sound right, because there was something _ceremonial_ about the way she decided to do it.

We had gone out for dinner to celebrate, and she invited me into her house afterwards. Let me just say, I was expecting something very different to go down that evening, so to speak.

“Finn,” she said, sitting angled towards me with her hands folded in her lap, “we need to talk.”

I knew that was a bad sign. Stacey hated talking to me; she loved talking _at_ me. Telling me things that neither one of us expected me to remember. But, “we need to talk,” was never good anyway, was it?

“Yeah?” I said.

“Look, I really like you,” she began, and I could tell there was a big, fat BUT coming, so I braced myself. “But,” she continued, “I don’t really think that we, you know, have all that much in common.”

“What are you talking about?” I asked stupidly. I knew exactly what she was talking about. We didn’t like any of the same things—books, movies, music, pizza toppings—and we didn’t share any of the same interests. My hobby was photography, and hers was saying mean things about people behind their backs.

“We’re just different people,” she said.

“Of course we’re different people,” I argued. “It’s literally impossible for us to be the same person.”

“How come you’re allowed to say ‘literally’ but you complain whenever I do?”

“Because I use it correctly.”

She rolled her eyes and huffed. Clearly that was the wrong thing to say at that moment. “See? This is what I’m talking about,” she said. “It just doesn’t work between us anymore, Finn.”

I looked down at my shoes and muttered, “Did it ever?”

I didn’t understand why now, after nearly two years, she suddenly decided that our differences were irreconcilable. We’d always been this way, bickering over stupid things. It was fine, wasn’t it?

“I think we should see other people,” she added with a sigh.

I snapped my head up to look at her. “You are already, aren’t you?” I said.

“Finn…”

“That’s not a ‘no.’”

“Nothing’s happened,” she said. “Yet.”

“And you couldn’t wait another day, could you?” I asked. “What, is he here right now, waiting for our date to be over? Why couldn’t you do this tomorrow? Or, hell, you could have done it yesterday!”

“I didn’t want to put a damper on your birthday,” she said.

“What the fuck do you think you’re doing now, then?” I said, almost shouting.

“At least you got to enjoy your birthday first.”

“I feel like this is going to overshadow all the other stuff,” I said. “When I look back on this day, I’m not going to remember the chicken parmigiana or the card from my Nan, but rather _this_. This moment.”

“That’s not my fault,” she said.

I nearly lost it. “Not your fault? _Not your fault?_ Are you serious right now?”

“How you choose to remember the day is completely up to you, Finn,” she replied calmly, like she wasn’t bothered by any of this. Like she wasn’t even sorry.

I didn’t know how to respond, so I didn’t. I just got up and left, and tried my best to think about the chicken parmigiana and the card from my Nan to anchor them in my brain. Maybe, if I was lucky, I would be able to hold onto those things instead of the breakup.

When I woke up the next day, I swore into my pillow for five minutes before having a shower and getting on with my day.

I should have been used to it, really. Nothing good ever happens to me.

***

“Say ‘cheese,’” I said as I came up behind my best friend, who was sitting on a bench outside the school. I was holding up my new camera and snapping photos of him before he could even realize what was happening.

“Jesus, Finn!” he grumbled, trying to cover his face with his hands while I laughed.

I took a seat next to him and set my camera on my lap. “How’s it going?” I asked, giving him a shove with my shoulder.

“Fine,” he said, putting his arms down. “How are things with you, though?”

“Also fine,” I replied.

“Really? You aren’t worried about seeing a certain someone for the first time since The Event?” he asked.

“It’s been six weeks, Arch. I’m over it.” That was mostly true. I wasn’t all that sad about losing _Stacey_ , specifically; just about being alone for the first time in two years. Starting my last year of college without no one by my side but Archie. Not to disparage Archie or anything; he was a great friend. I just didn’t particularly want to kiss him goodbye before class—as much as there may have been rumours floating around to the contrary.

I picked up my camera and pointed it towards the school where there was a cluster of girls. I couldn’t see who they were until I zoomed in—it was Stacey and her posse. I felt a twinge in my gut, like someone was twisting a knife around inside me, just to make sure I was good and stabbed. Wouldn’t want me to survive it now, would we?

I pointed the camera away quickly and found I was zoomed in on someone’s black leather jacket—all I could see was the bottom edge and zipper. I zoomed back out and realized that I didn’t recognize the wearer of the jacket, sitting on another bench, reading. That was strange. I knew everyone at this school. It was a small town and I’d been going to school with the same group of people for over a decade.

She didn’t seem like the kind of person I would forget, either. She wasn’t like the other girls at school, with their blonde-to-light-brunette hair piled on top of their heads in messy topknots, wearing skinny jeans and tank tops, and borrowing their boyfriends’ hoodies when it got too chilly. Her long hair fell around her shoulders, like a dark waterfall over her leather jacket, and her denim mini-skirt—which she wore over leggings—looked like it had been Frankensteined together out of five old pairs of jeans. I could see the letters ASI on her t-shirt, peeking out under her jacket, and assumed it was part of the word, “OASIS.” (I approved of the band choice.)

“Who is that?” I asked Archie, giving him a nudge.

“Who’s who?”

I nodded towards the mystery girl.

“I dunno,” he said. “She’s probably new.”

“Obviously,” I replied, sounding like a dick. “There’s never anyone new around here, though.”

“Why don’t you go be an ambassador to the school and introduce yourself?” Archie teased. “Find out who she is and ask if she needs help finding her classes.”

“I’m not going to do that,” I said.

“Why not?” he asked, even though we both knew the suggestion had been a joke.

“I’m not _that_ pathetic yet, all right?”

“Sure, buddy.”

***

My first class of the day was French. Which was fine. I was good at French. I was good at most subjects. (I was one of the few kids at school who’d always been gifted in both Maths _and_ Gym.)

Still, when I picked a spot to sit down, I immediately collapsed onto my desk, burying my head in my arms, like I couldn’t wait for the day to be over even though it hadn’t even begun yet. I heard people trickle in, and then I heard the bell ring—the bell indicating we were supposed to already be in our seats—and even more people rushed in. I still didn’t look up.

The teacher started taking attendance, calling out the names of the usual suspects—the people I’d been in classes with for years and years. Lindsey Broadbent. Phillip Carrington. Holly Dewberry.

“Rachel Earl,” the teacher said, snapping me out of my near-slumber with a name I didn’t recognize.

I lifted my head just in time to see that girl in the leather jacket, sitting a few seats over, raise her hand. At least now I had a name for the face, which I kept staring at in profile until my name was called.

I looked forward and said, “Yeah?” like I’d never done this before.

“Vous êtes présent, Monsieur Nelson?” the teacher asked.

“Oui, présent,” I replied sheepishly, realizing that everyone was now looking at me, including the new girl.

I could feel the eyes start to peel away from me, but when I glanced sideways, I noticed that the new girl was still watching me with an amused expression. I scowled at her, out of self-consciousness more than anything else, and mouthed, “What!”

She shrugged her eyebrows, if that’s even a thing, and turned her attention to the front of the room where the teacher was explaining what we’d be learning this year.

“Mais d’abord, une petite révision,” the teacher said, picking up a stack of papers off her desk. She started passing them out and I had this sinking feeling in my stomach— _pop quiz_.

“Ne vous inquiétez pas,” she added, noticing the expressions on our faces, “cela ne compte pas pour une bonne partie de votre note. Je dois tout simplement évaluer où nous sommes. Il ne vous prendra qu'une vingtaine de minutes.”

Twenty minutes? We’ll see about that.


	2. Chapter 2

It took me thirteen minutes to finish the quiz, though I wasn’t sure I’d gotten everything right. I always liked to be the first one finished a test, though. I got up to walk my completed test to the front of the room at the same time that the new girl—Rachel, was it?—brought up hers.

“Vous êtes rapides,” the teacher said quietly as we handed her our quizzes. “Vous pouvez lire silencieusement. Je recommande de commencer _Huis Clos_ , si vous n’avez pas déjà.”

I returned to my seat and got my copy of Sartre’s _Huis Clos_ from my bag to start reading it, since I hadn’t already. I took a look over towards Rachel and noticed she’d picked up something else to read. I had to squint to make out what it was. Simone de Beauvoir’s _Pour une morale de l'ambiguïté_. Not quite the assigned reading, but same ballpark of mid-century French existentialism, yeah?

It was another half hour before everyone was finished the quiz, and the class was nearly over.

“Puisque nous avons perdu du temps, vous devrez faire vos devoirs avec une partenaire ce soir après l'école,” said the teacher as she picked up a red pail off her desk and handed it to the person closest to her. She instructed us each to take a slip of paper that would have a word on it, either English or French, and pair up with the person who had the translation of that word.

The word I picked up was _rien_ , meaning I was looking for someone who had _nothing_. Which seemed appropriate. I wasn’t sure how to go about finding my other half, however, since I didn’t really want to talk to anyone else unless I absolutely had to.

Lindsey Broadbent asked me what I got, but she had the word _flocon_ —which seemed appropriate for her, too, as she was a bit of a _flake_.

It wasn’t until almost everyone else had left the room that I figured who had _nothing_. The new girl. I got up and walked over to where she was still sitting, reading, like she was waiting for the bell to dismiss her even though the teacher said we could go once we were paired up.

“Um, what did you get?” I asked her, trying to act like she didn’t sort of terrify me.

“Nothing,” she replied without looking up from her book.

“Me too,” I said as I held up my slip of paper. “I guess that makes us partners.”

“I guess.” She didn’t sound too enthused about that.

“So, do you want to meet out front after school?” I asked. “By the tree shaped like a Y?”

She closed her book and stood up so that she was eye-level with me. “Okay,” she said, then slung her bag over her shoulder and walked out.

***

After Geometry and Chemistry was lunch, my favourite time of day. First, because I was always really hungry by the time lunch rolled around and the food in the cafeteria was actually good, surprisingly; and second, because I got to spend fifty minutes hanging out with my friends in the middle of the day, and who doesn’t love that?

There was Archie, who’d been my best friend since the first day of school ever, and Izzy, who’d been hanging around us for a few years now, and then Chloe, who was an addition to our group late last year. The only one of the gang missing was Izzy’s boyfriend, Chop, who didn’t go to school anymore, but I saw him most weekends.

I filled my lunch tray with food from the cafeteria and headed over to our usual table, where the others were already waiting. They tended to bring their own lunches, since they didn’t love the food here as much as I did.

As I was walking past other tables, something caught my attention out of the corner of my eye, so I turned my head to look without even thinking about it. I hadn’t realized that the thing that had caught my eye was Rachel’s leather jacket, once again. I looked away as soon as I realized what I was doing, and before she could catch me watching her, but I noticed that she was sitting alone. I assumed she didn’t have any friends here, and that made me feel kind of bad for her, even though she didn’t seem particularly nice from what I could tell.

I sat down with my group, but kept glancing over at her, sitting there all by herself, and I wondered if I ought to invite her to sit with us.

“Oi, Finn,” said Archie, drawing my attention back towards my own table.

“What?” I said, though I didn’t mean to sound so irritated.

“Are you in?”

“In what?”

“For the annual end-of-first-week party on Saturday,” he said.

“It’s at my house,” said Chloe, “which means it’s going to be a pool party!”

“Woo!” said Izzy, giving Chloe a high-five.

“Sounds good,” I said, though I could tell that Archie didn’t look super pleased about that aspect of it. He wouldn’t tell me why, but ever since last year, he’d refused to go swimming. “How were your first classes?” I asked him, trying to change the subject—while the girls talked about swimming costumes—so he wouldn’t dwell on it.

“Fine. Boring,” he said. “Yours?”

“Same,” I replied. “Though we had a pop quiz _and_ a partnered homework assignment in French this morning.”

“On the first day?”

“Yeah. I guess Madame McMahon has a lot planned for us this term.”

“I should keep that in mind,” he said. “I think I have her for French next term.”

“Also, that new girl is in my French class,” I added, glancing over at her for a moment.

“Yeah?”

“Her name’s Rachel, I think,” I said.

“Wait, are you talking about the new girl?” said Chloe, butting into our conversation.

I nodded.

“She’s in my Drama class and she is so weird,” she continued.

I waited for her to give an example to back up her claim, but she didn’t. (No wonder she never did that well on essays.)

“I have to meet up with her this afternoon to work on our French assignment,” I said.

“Good luck with that.”

I took a bite of cottage pie and, with my mouth full, replied, “Thanks.”

***

I didn’t meet up with Archie after school like I usually did, since I had that French project to work on—as much as I would have preferred going to play football with him and the guys, or something similar. Had this been a solo homework assignment, I probably would have just skipped it—or done it quickly the next morning—but another person’s academic integrity was on the line.

When I got to the Y-shaped tree out in front of the school, Rachel was already sitting under it, reading her book again. I walked up to her but she didn’t seem to notice.

“What does ‘ _Pour une morale de l'ambiguïté_ ’ mean?” I asked as I stood over her.

She looked up at me and squinted, holding up her hand to shield her face from the sun. “In English it’s called, ‘The Ethics of Ambiguity.’”

“And what does that mean?”

“I don’t know yet, I only started reading it today,” she said with a hint of playfulness that had been lacking from our previous—and brief—interaction.

I dropped my bag to the ground by her feet and sat next to her against the tree. “Why are you reading that?”

“I dunno,” she said, closing the book before I had a chance to see anything. “So much of what we have to read for school is written by men, I thought I would try something different.”

“So you’re just not going to do the assigned reading?”

“No, I’ve already read it.”

“Oh. I’m Finn, by the way,” I said, without offering to shake her hand, since that seemed like a weird thing to do.

“Rae,” she replied. She didn’t really look at me though.

“And where did you come from, Rae?” I asked. I was trying to sound clever and cheeky, not accusatory, but I wasn’t sure it came across that way.

“Um, here, originally,” she said. “But, most recently, France.”

“Why were you in France?”

“Because that’s where I lived for a year,” she said, not really answering my question.

“Okay…” I said when it seemed like a more detailed answer wasn’t forthcoming. “But if you’re from here originally, how come I’ve never seen you before?”

“I moved around a lot,” she said without looking at me. “Plus I was homeschooled by my dad, so I never really got to know other people my age.”

“Why are you here now, then?” I asked, though I realized as soon as I did that it was too personal of a question when I saw her expression change. It went from wistful to worried.

“So,” I added quickly to change the subject, “should we get going?”

She turned her head and really looked at me. It was the first time I was able to get a look at her eyes, those massive eyes, green and brown like a lush forest—hazel, I guess—and so dimensional. I almost didn’t hear her say, “Go where?”

“Oh, uh, my house, maybe,” I suggested, prying my eyes away from hers.

“Is it far?” she asked.

“Nah, it’s walking distance.”


	3. Chapter 3

Rae and I didn’t talk much on the walk to my house. I didn’t really know what to say, and I wasn’t sure she wanted me to say anything. I still couldn’t figure out if she disliked me for some reason, or if that was just the way she was.

“Here we are,” I said as I led her up the steps towards my front door, as if it wasn’t completely obvious based on the fact that we were walking towards the front door.

“Nice house,” she said while I unlocked the door.

“Thanks,” I replied, uncertain of what to say to such a comment. It wasn’t as though I had anything to do with the niceness of the house.

“Are your parents home?” she asked once we were inside.

“Uh, my dad’s still at work,” I said. “Why?”

“I just wasn’t sure if I needed to introduce myself to anyone.”

“No, no one’s here right now.”

“Okay. Good,” she said. “So…?” She swayed back and forth like she was waiting for me to tell her where to go.

“We can work in the kitchen, I guess,” I said, pointing towards the kitchen with my entire arm. I waited for a second to see if she was going to go first and then decided to lead the way.

I set my bag on the peninsula—it wasn’t an island because it was attached to the rest of the countertop—and pulled out my French notebook. She took a seat at the kitchen table.

“So we need to write a scene using six examples of _le subjonctif_ ,” I said as I sat down as well, reading my notes. “I… don’t remember what that is.”

“It’s an expression of hope, doubt, uncertainty—that sort of thing” she replied, even though her notebook was still closed.

“And then the verbs are all conjugated really stupid, aren’t they?”

“Je doute que nous puissions l’accomplir,” she said, shaking her head.

“Hey, I was only joking,” I said defensively.

She looked at me and smiled a little. “So was I.” She opened up her notebook, then closed it suddenly. “Can I use your washroom?” she asked.

“Uh, yeah, it’s just down that hall to the left,” I told her, indicating the direction with a nod of my head.

“Thanks.”

I flipped through my notebook as she walked away, though I’d only written anything on the first page, and that was just the assignment. “Hope, doubt, or uncertainty,” I muttered to myself as I jotted it down.

After a few minutes, I heard her call my name from down the hall, and I wondered if something bad had happened. I was worried I was going to find her curled up and bleeding on the bathroom floor—from what, I don’t know. I rushed over there, but saw her standing in the hallway looking at the photos on the wall.

“Did you take these?” she asked as she examined one of a streetscape at night. I had set it on a long exposure so the cars and lights were all blurred. “They’re amazing.”

“Yeah,” I said, scratching the back of my head—I hoped she realized I was answering her first question, not agreeing with her about how amazing they were. “How did you know that I took these?”

“I saw you with your camera at school this morning,” she said.

“Oh, you saw that?” I was suddenly very embarrassed; she must have noticed me pointing it at her, but she didn’t say anything about it.

“Could I see it up close?”

“See what? My camera?”

“Yes.”

“Oh, um, okay,” I said as we walked back towards the kitchen.

I kept the camera in a case inside my school bag, so I pulled it out onto the countertop and showed it to her.

“Cool,” she said. “How long have you had it?”

“I’ve had this one for about six weeks, since my birthday,” I said. “But I’ve had a camera of one kind or another since I was a kid.”

“And this is what you want to do?” she asked.

“It’s what I like _doing_ , but I dunno if it’s what I want to _do_.”

“May I?” she said, holding her hands over the camera like she wanted to pick it up. I nodded and she lifted it, turning it over and regarding it with fascination.

“Do you want to see something really cool?” I said after a minute.

She set down the camera and said, “Sure…”

“Come on.” I led her out of the kitchen and up the stairs to my room, when I came to the realization that this was weird. Inviting a girl up to my room with the vague promise of “something cool” seemed a little creepy, when I thought about it from her perspective. It didn’t help that my room was a mess—or maybe it did, because made it clear I was not expecting to have any girls up here today.

I went straight to my bookshelf on the far side of the room, which held a few books but also my old cameras, including my prized possession.

“This,” I said, picking up one of the cameras, “is my dad’s old Nikon F2, which he let me have a few years ago.”

“Wow, is that a film camera?” she asked, coming closer to get a better look.

“Yeah,” I bragged. I didn’t feel like mentioning that I was too afraid to shoot film because I messed up about three-quarters of all the shots I took.

“That is really cool,” she said.

I set the camera back on the shelf and her eyes started to wander over its other contents, stopping at another photograph of a woman with a small child—though I didn’t take this photo.

“Is that you when you were little?” she asked as she leaned in to look at it.

“Yeah, that’s me and my mum,” I said.

“Where is your mum?” she said, still looking at the photograph with intense focus.

“What do you mean?” I replied nervously.

She stood up straight and faced me. “I mean, you said your dad was still at work, but where’s your mum?”

“Oh, she, uh, she left when I was a kid,” I told her.

“Oh, I’m sorry.” Her expression grew soft and sympathetic, and I wondered for a second if she was going to hug me, until I realized that was crazy. She barely even knew me.

But there was that moment—that moment of hope, doubt, uncertainty—where I didn’t quite know what was going to happen.

“Come on,” she finally said. “We’ve got homework.”

***

Although we returned to the kitchen table, with our books sitting out like we were going to work, we kept discussing photography for half an hour before Rae said she had to leave.

“But we haven’t even finished the assignment,” I said. We hadn’t even really _started_ the assignment.

“I have to get home or my mum will freak out,” she said. “But I can write this up myself.”

“Are you sure?” I asked. I didn’t want to make her do all the work while I sat around and did nothing.

“I don’t mind, really. It’ll take me five minutes,” she said.

“Je doute que tu dises la vérité,” I joked.

“Je doute que tu saches quoi que ce soit,” she retorted.

“Oh yeah, well, je doute que… que…” I couldn’t think of a comeback in _le subjonctif_ , so I just trailed off and she laughed at me.

“I’d better go, Finn,” she said as she packed up her stuff into her bag and stood up.

“I’ll walk you out,” I said, standing up as well.

“I think I know where the door is, thanks,” she said. “I’ll see you tomorrow.”

“See you,” I replied, and gave her a stupid wave as though I didn’t know how to interact with other humans.

***

“Hi,” I said to Rae when I got to French class the next morning and found her sitting at her desk, still reading.

“Hi,” she replied without looking up at me.

I wanted to ask if she’d finished the assignment, but it seemed like she was done with our little exchange, so I went and sat down at my own desk. I’d hoped she would let me see it before we had to go up and present it to the class, but it didn’t seem likely at this point.

The teacher took attendance at the beginning of class before getting the first pair to present their scene. There were several groups before ours. I was just trying not to fall asleep—they were _so_ boring.

She looked around the room like she was trying to determine who had not yet presented. “Ah, Finn,” she said when her eyes landed on me. “Vous n’avez pas encore présenté,” she said. “Qui est votre partenaire?”

“Um, Rae,” I answered.

The teacher looked confused, like she didn’t know who “Rae” was.

“C’est moi,” Rae said, raising her hand.

“Rachel,” said the teacher, though she pronounced it like _Rochelle_ because she always tried to make people’s names sound French. “Bien. Allez-y.”

I stood up and walked hesitantly towards the front of the room, glancing over at Rae who pulled a couple of sheets of paper out of her notebook before standing as well. She handed one of them to me once we were in front of everyone.

I looked out at the rest of the class and my heart raced. I hated public speaking. Even with a script, I always got tongue-tied, and I talked either too quietly or too loud.

Rae had the first line—she’d written our names before each line so I’d know whose was whose—so I let her speak first, then I read my line. I wasn’t even paying attention to the words; I just said them. It wasn’t until I heard other people laughing that I started to tune into what either of us was saying.

The whole premise of the scene was that I was a know-it-all who didn’t know anything. I wasn’t sure how I could be both at the same time, except that it was pretty accurate, when I thought about it. I wasn’t sure if people were laughing at the scene—it was pretty funny—or at me, for playing a caricature of myself.

“Merci, merci,” the teacher said to us once we’d finished and the class applauded politely, like they did for every scene.

When we returned to our desks, I shot Rae a look as if to say, “Thanks for making me look like an idiot,” to which she responded with a smirk that said, “You’re welcome.”


	4. Chapter 4

As I sat down at my usual table for lunch, I noticed that Rae was sitting all alone once again, and once again I felt bad about it. I didn’t even realize I was staring while I popped chips into my mouth absent-mindedly until Archie nudged me with his elbow.

“Ow, what?” I said, turning my attention to him.

“How’d your homework go last night?” he asked, motioning towards Rae with his head.

“Uh, fine,” I said, lowering my gaze to the tray of food in front of me. “I mean, I think we did okay on it.”

“Why don’t you ask her to sit over here?” he said as he stole one of my chips.

“I dunno,” I replied. I glanced at her for a second before looking back at Archie. I suddenly got a panicky feeling in my stomach when he stood up and I knew what he was about to do.

I watched him walk over towards her—it was like watching a train wreck; I couldn’t look away. He leaned over with one hand on her table and started talking to her. She looked like she was smiling at him as she talked back. Then I noticed her look over in my direction, so I tore my eyes away in an abrupt manner and ate another chip self-consciously. I was too afraid to look up again until I felt Archie return to the table, but he wasn’t alone.

“Everyone, this is Rae,” said Archie, placing a hand on her back like they were old pals. “Rae, this is everyone. Izzy, Chloe, and you know Finn, of course.”

“Of course,” she said, giving me a sarcastic smile.

I still couldn’t tell if she hated me or just liked giving me a hard time. Glancing down at her t-shirt—which I noticed was an Arctic Monkeys shirt today—I realized she could easily give me a hard time, if you know what I mean. (God, that’s gross. But true.) I shifted uncomfortably in my seat and looked back down at my chips.

She sat down at the table next to me and her leg bumped into mine, so I moved it away instinctively.

“So, Rae, we were just talking about our annual end-of-first-week party happening this Saturday,” Archie said.

“No, we weren’t,” Chloe snapped, glaring at him.

“Well, we were yesterday,” he replied. “You have any interest in coming?” he added to Rae.

“I’m not really into a big parties,” she said.

Archie and I laughed.

“What?” she said.

“We don’t have _big parties_ ,” I said condescendingly, as if this were obvious and also a cool thing to brag about. Which it was not. “It’s just the four of us plus Chop.”

“My boyfriend,” Izzy added.

“Oh,” said Rae.

“You’re welcome to come, Rae,” said Archie, ignoring Chloe’s glares from across the table.

“Yeah,” Chloe said through her teeth. “The more the merrier. Also, it’s a pool party.” She smiled phonily like she thought this would dissuade Rae from attending. And it almost did.

“I don’t really like swimming,” Rae replied.

“Me, neither,” said Archie. “You can keep me company on dry land, okay?”

She smiled a little. “Okay.”

Even though I had no reason to be jealous of Archie—she wasn’t exactly his _type_ —I was jealous.

***

Rae ended up joining us for lunch for the rest of the week, which was the only time I saw her outside of class until Saturday at Chloe’s house. She was approaching the house on foot as I pulled up into the driveway.

“Hi,” I said to her when I stepped out of the car.

“Hi,” she replied with a nod. “I guess I’m in the right place.”

“You are, indeed,” I said, though I immediately regretted the choice to use the word “indeed,” since it made me sound like a dork.

We both stood, frozen in place, each waiting for the other to make the first move towards the front door. I suddenly remembered that I’d left my bag in the car, so I reached in to grab it and when I turned around, she was already at the door. I caught up to her with a jog in my step as the door was opening.

“Finn, you made it!” Chloe said cheerfully and threw her arms around my neck in some sort of hug. She was wearing a towel robe, but it was hanging open so I could see her bikini underneath, which made me weirdly uncomfortable. For some reason it was okay in the pool or at the beach, but in this everyday context it was as if she’d come to greet us in her underwear.

“Yeah, hi,” I said, patting her on the back awkwardly with my free arm.

“Hi, Rae,” she added when she took a step back and saw who was standing next to me. She was far less enthused about that greeting.

“Hi, Chloe,” said Rae, like she wasn’t all that enthused either.

“Well, come on in,” said Chloe, making room for us to enter the house. “The gang’s all here, now.”

I let Rae go first—for chivalry or some sexist reason like that, I’m sure—and followed shortly behind as Chloe led us to the back of the house with the indoor pool. I’ll admit, one of the benefits of being friends with Chloe was that she had a fucking indoor pool. Pardon my French.

I excused myself to use the powder room so I could change into my swim trunks before joining the rest of the gang by the pool. Izzy and Chop were already splashing around in the water when I got there, and Rae had taken a seat next to Archie on the sidelines.

“Finn, come on,” Chloe said, waving me over to the pool.

I noticed that Rae looked over at me when Chloe called my name and I felt very self-conscious about being topless at that moment, so I hurried to the pool and cannonballed into the water, which made the other girls yell at me.

“My hair’s all wet!” Chloe whined.

“Sorry,” I muttered. What did she expect? She was in a pool, for crying out loud.

We swam around for a while, and played that game where Izzy and Chloe got on Chop’s and my shoulders and tossed a beach ball back and forth, which was probably more fun for the girls than it was for us. I got bored after fifteen minutes and dumped Chloe into the water—she wasn’t super thrilled about that. (“My hair!”)

I kept glancing over at Archie and Rae, who appeared to be having a great time talking about something. The topic of their conversation was unknown to me, but it involved Rae touching Archie’s arm more than once. Again, I had no reason to be jealous, but that didn’t stop me.

“Sorry, Chlo,” I said when I managed to pry my attention away from them. I turned my back to Chloe and looked over my shoulder at her. “Get back on.”

***

By the time the four of us were sufficiently _pruned_ from the water—which I learned is a evolutionary trait developed so we could grip things underwater and not, like I had thought, because of osmosis—we got out of the pool and quickly wrapped towels around ourselves to dry off and fight the chill of the air.

I wrapped my towel around my waist because my trunks were still wet and clinging to me, and I didn’t think anyone needed to see that.

Once we were all dried and changed back into our clothes, we headed down to the basement with the big television and all the gaming consoles—they were Chloe’s older sister’s consoles. Chop uncovered _Rock Band 4_ in one of the drawers of the entertainment unit, and after searching the closet at the back of the basement, we found the paraphernalia that went with it. There was one guitar, a drum set, and a microphone, so we took turns playing in groups.

It wasn’t until the fourth or fifth song that I realized Rae hadn’t played at all.

“Did you want to go next?” I asked her, holding out the little plastic guitar.

“I don’t know how to play,” she said.

“You just push the buttons when they show up on the screen,” I said.

She shook her head. “Thanks, I’m okay.”

“Why don’t you sing, Rae?” said Archie, walking over to her with the microphone. “It’s really easy.”

“I can’t sing,” she replied shyly.

“Neither can Chop, but that doesn’t stop him,” he said.

She laughed a little and Chop pretended to get offended, even though we all knew it was true.

“Come on,” Archie continued.

“Okay…” she said after a minute. She stood up and walked towards us so she could see the TV better.

“I’ll pick the song,” I said as I scrolled through the song list. I stopped at one and smiled to myself. It was an Arctic Monkeys song, which I thought would impress her, given the shirt she wore the other day.

“I don’t know this one,” said Izzy, sitting behind the drum kit.

“Just hit the drums when it says to,” I told her.

“Well, I know that,” she said as if I were being a prat, which I was.

“We can play a different one,” said Rae.

“We’re playing this one,” I insisted. “Let’s go.”

The song began, and Izzy did a pretty good job of keeping up the drums. I missed the first note but recovered quickly. It was more difficult than I expected it to be, but I wasn’t very good at this game to begin with.

And then Rae came in. And she had the voice of an angel. And I almost missed the next few notes, I was so caught off-guard. I tried to look at her out of the corner of my eye while I watched the screen, but it was difficult to say the least. When I caught a glimpse of her, she was smiling, and I felt proud of myself, despite the fact that I’d just missed a whole bunch of notes.

“Finn!” Izzy squealed at me to get my attention back in the game.

We finished the song and Rae said, “That was fun.” Then she looked over at Archie and said, “Thanks, Arch,” and my heart sank a little bit.


	5. Chapter 5

That’s a funny expression, “My heart sank.” Sank into what? Well, quicksand, by the feel of it.

It was the feeling I had when Archie offered to drive Rae home. I could have done that. I could have been the one to offer, and drive her back to her house, and laugh with her, so carefree like that. But I didn’t. He did. And for that, my heart sank deeper and deeper until I forgot it was ever there.

When I got to school on Monday, I found Archie sitting where I usually found him in the morning, only he wasn’t alone. Rae was sitting with him. If I didn’t know any better, I’d have thought they were _together_.

Archie must have just said something funny, because Rae was laughing, but she stopped abruptly when I approached them.

“Hey,” I said.

“Hey,” Archie replied, giving me a nod. “How’s it going?”

“Not bad,” I said as I shifted my bag on my shoulder. “How was your weekend?”

“I saw you Saturday night,” he said with a laugh.

“Yeah, but I mean, after that.”

“Fine…”

I turned my attention to Rae. “And you?”

“Also fine,” she said, though she looked like she was hiding something.

“Well,” Archie said, standing up, “Uncle Archie had better get to class. See you nerds at lunch.”

“Don’t call yourself that,” I said as he walked away, and he flipped me off behind his back without looking at me.

Rae laughed and stood up. “Shall we?” she said to me.

“Shall we what?” I asked.

“French,” she said matter-of-factly.

My eyes widened in shock for a moment until I realized she meant we needed to go to French class. “Oh, um, right,” I said quickly, hoping she hadn’t noticed my initial misinterpretation. She kind of simultaneously smiled and frowned at me in a way that suggested she had noticed, but didn’t say anything about it.

“So,” I added as we started walking. “Did you enjoy the party?”

“I did, yeah,” she replied, falling into step with me.

“But you didn’t swim.”

“Right.”

“How do you have fun at a pool party without swimming?” I asked.

“I talked to Archie. He’s funny,” she said, like I didn’t already know that.

“Sure, but why weren’t the two of you swimming?”

“Because we’re vampires,” she said. “We can’t get wet or we die.”

“Isn’t that fire?”

“Whatever.”

“I’m serious, though, why not?” Apparently I couldn’t let this go.

“That,” she said, poking me in the arm, “is none of your business.”

“Fine, fine,” I said. “So you and Archie got along all right, then?”

“Yeah, he’s cool.”

“You know he’s gay, right?” I added suddenly, defensively, pathetically.

“Really? Because he did some pretty not-gay stuff to me after the party,” she said.

“What!”

She burst out laughing and pointed at me. “Oh my god, your face! That was priceless.”

“Har har.”

“No, of course I know he’s gay,” she said as her laughter subsided. “He literally introduced himself to me as ‘Archie, Finn’s gay best friend.’”

“Really?”

She laughed again. “Wow, you are too easy.”

“Is that what it says on the bathroom wall?” I said, lamely attempting a joke. I knew Archie was The Funny One, but I tried.

She scrunched up her nose but laughed anyway, like she thought it was funny but knew it was distasteful. She stopped walking before we could turn the corner towards our classroom, and grabbed my arm to stop me as well. “Do you want to skip class right now?” she asked.

“Um, okay,” I said hesitantly. “Why?”

She smirked. “For fun.”

***

As I followed Rae quickly out of the school, I realized I had no idea where we were going or why—she just wanted to skip class, and I wanted to skip with her. We made sure to leave the school grounds from the side instead of the front where the main office window looked out.

“Where are you taking me?” I asked as we crossed the road. But I didn’t really care where we went anyway, as long as it was just the two of us.

“I want to show you something,” she said, looking back at me over her shoulder for a second.

I secretly hoped that _something_ was her bra, as much as I doubted that to be the case. (Hope, doubt, uncertainty.)

She led me to a park, past the jungle gym and swing set over towards the tree-lined river. Or perhaps it was a creek. I made a mental note to look up the difference later, but I suspected it was a creek because it was small.

We followed the path along the edge of the creek for a few minutes until the swing set was nothing but a distant memory. She stopped walking and began climbing down the slope towards the water, hugging a diagonally-growing tree for balance.

“Come on,” she said to me when she noticed I was still standing up on the path, like an idiot.

I hesitated for a moment before climbing down after her. When I got to the very edge of the water, I saw that she had ducked under the slanted tree where there was a hollow section in the riverbank. (Creek-bank?)

“What is this?” I asked as I took a seat next to her on a slightly damp log.

“This is my secret hiding place,” she said.

I laughed. “What?”

“I used to come here when I was little,” she explained. “I thought it was so cool. But I haven’t been here in ages.”

“And why did you bring me here now?”

“I dunno,” she said. “It seemed like it would be a fun thing to do.” She turned and looked at me and I was mesmerized by her eyes again. “Don’t you ever do something just because it’s fun?”

I was about to say, “Yeah, of course,” but after I thought about it for a moment, I wasn’t so sure. “I don’t know,” I finally said.

Her face flashed with concern. “That’s kind of sad.”

“Yeah…” I looked down out of embarrassment or shame or something like that and noticed a small frog in the water in front of me. “Hey, check it out,” I whispered, pointing at it.

I slipped my bag off my shoulder and got out my camera, hoping that the frog wouldn’t hop away before I had a chance to snap a photo of it. I actually managed to get a few shots before it dipped into the water and disappeared. “That was cool,” I said.

“I told you.”

I smiled as I sat back on the log and pointed my camera at her. “Say cheese!”

“Uh-uh,” she said, holding up her hand in front of the lens. “I don’t do pictures.”

“Why not?”

“I’m a vampire, I don’t show up in photos,” she deadpanned.

“Then how come you’re out in daylight, Ms. Smartypants?”

“I’m sparkling, can’t you tell?”

“Yeah, now that you mention it,” I teased, giving up and setting my camera down in my lap.

“Just enjoy being surrounded by nature, for once,” she said seriously.

I bobbed my head up and down, not quite nodding in agreement, and surveyed the area around us. It was quite peaceful. I snapped a few more photos of _nature_ and put my camera away. “So, what do you do here?” I asked after several minutes.

“Just sit,” she said. “Sometimes I read. Sometimes I just watch the water flow past.”

“That’s very zen,” I said as I pulled my phone out of my pocket to check the time. We’d be halfway through class if we’d decided to go.

Wickedly, I switched to my camera app and held up my phone in Rae’s direction so I could get a shot of her before she noticed.

“Hey!” she said, swatting at my phone with both hands.

I laughed and pried it away from her to slip it back in my pocket. “Gotcha,” I said triumphantly.

“You’d better delete that.” She sounded serious but there was a hint of delight in her eyes, like she found it slightly amusing.

“I will,” I said. “Later.”

“Why would you even want a photo of me?” she added, looking away from me.

“Because,” I said.

“Because what?” She turned back to face me again, though she appeared unimpressed by my answer.

“Because,” I repeated. “Because you’re…” I couldn’t get the word out. My mouth felt dry and I had butterflies in my stomach, but if only butterflies were made of fire. I tried to conjure up enough saliva to swallow, but it was difficult.

“I’m what, Finn?” she said, glaring at me, daring me to say something horrible.

“Beautiful!” I managed to sputter, my voice cracking a little in the middle like I was still going through that awkward phase of puberty.

She frowned as though I’d just called her a cow. “What?”

“I mean, like—I don’t mean—I mean—What?” I said, horribly confused by her reaction.

“You called me beautiful,” she said.

“Yeah…”

“Why would you say that? That’s just mean.”

“Wait, how is that mean?” I asked.

“It’s not true, that’s what makes it mean,” she said.

“Rae, I promise you—and I’m not saying this just because I want to kiss you right now—you are beautiful.”

She looked like she was considering this for a moment, and then leaned towards me in slow motion and kissed me. Her kiss tasted like coffee and petrichor and rebellion, with a hint of mint.

As it turned out, we were going to French after all.

***

Rae wasn’t at our table at lunch that day, and when I scanned the cafeteria, I couldn’t see her anywhere. I knew she’d returned to school because we walked back together, so why wasn’t she having lunch with us?

What had I done?


	6. Chapter 6

I didn’t see Rae again until French class the next day. She sat in her usual seat, wearing her unusual clothing, and I sat in the seat next to hers. My presence appeared to startle her out of staring ahead blankly.

“Hi,” I said, like the wonderful conversation-starter that I am.

“Hi,” she replied, avoiding eye contact with me.

“I, uh, didn’t see you at lunch yesterday.”

“I know,” she said. I should have seen that coming.

“I mean, um, why didn’t I see you at lunch?” I asked.

“Because I wasn’t here at lunch.”

“Okay, why weren’t you here?” I always felt like I had to ask fifty questions just to get one answer out of her.

“I was elsewhere.”

“Are you fucking with me right now?”

She turned to face me, surprised by my outburst—as was I, to be honest. “It’s just none of your business,” she said.

“We made out and then you disappeared,” I said. “How is this not my business?”

“Could you maybe not announce that to the whole world? Thanks,” she said.

“What, are you embarrassed by me or something?”

“No, just—” She sighed. “I just don’t think it was such a good idea, what happened by the creek.” (Ah, so it was a creek.)

“Why not?” I said, trying to keep my voice lower as people filtered into the room.

“We can’t discuss this now,” she hissed, nodding her head towards the front of the room where the teacher was standing and watching everyone take their seats. “Go back to your spot, class is about to start.”

***

“Ugh, Finn, what is that?” asked Chloe, looking down at my lunch with disdain.

“Some kind of meat thing with gravy, I think,” I said, prodding at the rectangle of brownish stuff with my plastic fork. Not all the cafeteria’s lunches were winners, I’ll admit.

“I don’t understand how you can eat like that and still look the way you look,” she said as she prodded her own lunch, some pathetically dry-looking salad she’d brought from home.

“Don’t give him body-issues, Chlo,” said Archie, and I got the distinct feeling he was mocking me.

“What, it was a compliment,” she said.

“Hey, guys,” said Rae as she approached our table.

“Hiya, Rae,” said Archie. “Where were you yesterday?”

“Oh, I went home early,” she said. “I wasn’t feeling well.”

“Are you sick?” Chloe asked. “If you’re contagious, don’t sit near me!”

“I don’t think menstrual cramps are contagious,” Rae replied dryly as she sat down next to me in the only available spot, and I wondered if that was true. Not the not-contagious part—I knew that was true—but the going home early due to menstrual cramps part. I kind of suspected that it wasn’t.

Call me a narcissist, but I couldn’t help feeling that Rae’s absence yesterday was about avoiding me, unless my kissing was terrible enough to induce menstrual cramps, somehow.

The crazy thing was that, for a brief moment in time, I thought she liked me. Sitting under that tree, practically inside the ground, with my ass getting cold from the damp log, I thought… I mean, _she_ kissed _me_ , right? I didn’t imagine that?

It was a nice moment—if a moment can last eight minutes—and then we walked back to the school in silence. Maybe that was the problem. Maybe she was waiting for me to say something afterwards besides, “I need to get back for Geometry.” Maybe I was a complete dick to her and that’s why she was upset with me. It wouldn’t be the first time I’d been a dick without realizing it. After many of my arguments with Stacey, over the course of our relationship, it had been brought to my attention that I was the one at fault due to my dickish behaviour.

“All right,” Archie said, drawing me out of my thought bubble, “who walked in on who naked?”

“What?”

“The two of you are just sitting there so awkwardly,” he added with laughter. “She must have accidentally seen your teeny weenie, Finn.”

“You of all people know that’s a lie,” I said to him.

Izzy looked shocked and delighted. “What is _that_ supposed to mean?”

“We’ve had Gym class together,” I explained. “Locker room, showers, et cetera.”

“You two have showered together?” Rae asked, stifling a laugh.

“Not _together_ , but—You know what, shut up.” I couldn’t help it; I started laughing, too.

“You know this is going to ruin my reputation, Finn,” said Archie. “I have certain standards and you, my friend, do not meet those standards.”

“Really?” said Chloe.

Archie raised an eyebrow at her.

“I’m just saying, I wouldn’t kick him out of bed for eating crackers,” she added.

“I’m right here,” I said, staring down at my rectangular lunch meat thing, completely and utterly embarrassed by the direction of the conversation.

“Hey, look, his ears are turning red,” said Izzy. When I looked at her she was pointing at my head, as if the others wouldn’t know where my ears were unless she indicated their whereabouts.

I covered my ears with my hands. “You’re all sadistic, I hope you know that.”

“We know,” Chloe said, smiling sweetly. “We know.”

***

Instead of meeting up with Archie and the guys for football after school, I rushed out the front of the building as soon as classes were over and hoped I could catch Rae before she left. I waited by the Y-shaped tree for ten minutes, and I was just about to give up and go home when I caught a glimpse of her black leather jacket.

I jogged over and fell in step beside her. “Hi,” I said, using my signature opening line.

“Hi,” she replied without slowing down or otherwise acknowledging my presence.

“Can we talk?” I asked.

“I have to get home,” she said.

“I’ll walk with you.”

“I’d rather you didn’t.”

“Come on, I think you owe me an explanation,” I said.

She stopped in her tracks and I nearly stumbled over my own feet trying to stop with her. “I don’t _owe_ you anything.”

“Okay, maybe that was a bad choice of words,” I said. “But I think it would be _kind_ and _generous_ of you to offer me one, anyway.”

“Can I be frank for a second?” she said with a huff.

“Okay, as long as I can still be Finn.”

She did not seem amused by my joke. “I don’t have an explanation for you,” she said. “I kissed you even though I knew it was a bad idea, and now we both have to live with those consequences.”

“Why was it a bad idea, though?” I asked. “I don’t get it.”

“Isn’t it obvious?”

I waited for her to continue, but she didn’t. “No,” I finally said.

“I have to get home, Finn,” she said as she continued walking.

“What’s obvious?” I called after her.

She spun around to face me and said, “Everything,” before turning back in her direction of travel.

If that were true, I wouldn’t have been nearly so confused.

***

I didn’t talk to Rae in French class the next day because I wanted to wait until I’d solved her riddle—“ _everything_ is obvious”—before I once again tried broaching the subject of us kissing. That didn’t stop me from staring at her, however.

“Finn,” said the teacher—although she said it like _Feen_. “Est-ce qu’il y a quelque chose qui ne va pas avec _Rochelle_?”

Rae looked over at me suddenly, snapping me out of my daze.

“What?” I said, a little disoriented.

“En Français, s’il vous plaît,” said the teacher.

“Um, non, Madame,” I said sheepishly when I realized everyone was watching me.

“Bon.” She went on to explain our homework—another partnered assignment. This time it was an essay about _Huis Clos_ due in one week. And we got to choose our partners.

I looked around the room when she told us to pair up, and people were—quickly. I was almost afraid I was going to end up with no partner, even though I knew that was impossible since there were an even number of students in the class.

That was when Lindsey Broadbent appeared out of nowhere and said, “Want to be partners?”

“Oh, um,” I said, stalling as I looked over at Rae, who was sitting all alone with no prospects. “I already said I’d work with Rae,” I told Lindsey. It wasn’t that I had anything against her, I just wanted to pass this assignment.

She looked a bit put out for a second, but glided away like she was just leaving the rejection behind and moved onto the next smart guy she could find.

I picked up my bag and walked over to Rae’s desk. “Partners?” I said.

She looked up at me, barely registering my face, and said, “I guess.”

“Your enthusiasm is killing me,” I said.

She didn’t laugh.


	7. Chapter 7

As I led Rae up the steps to my front door once again, I wondered if she was ever going to speak to me. We’d been silent the whole way from school—for eleven minutes. Maybe there was a way we could do this project without talking. We could just take turns writing sentences on the page and hope it turned out a coherent essay, perhaps?

“Well,” I said once we were inside, thus breaking our streak, “I guess we should set up in the kitchen.”

I offered her a glass of water or a cup of tea when we got there, but she shook her head to decline.

We sat down at the table across from one another and I got out _Huis Clos_ and my notebook. “So,” I began, reading over my notes, “we’re supposed to write a thousand-word essay on the meaning of _‘l’enfer, c’est les autres’_ using examples from the play.”

She nodded in agreement.

“Hell is other people,” I said. “So, like, being around other people is hell? The worst punishment is to have to spend eternity with other people? Interpersonal relationships are torture?”

Her face started to twitch and I could tell she wanted to say something, to correct me. “That’s not what he meant!” she said exasperatedly.

I suppressed a smile.

“He meant that we tend to know ourselves through others, the way others perceive and judge us, and so we are trapped in this sort of hell of not being able to know ourselves as ourselves, and if we have poor relationships with others then—” She stopped once she looked up at me. I must not have been suppressing that smile very well. “What?” she said.

“At least I got you talking,” I said.

“Well done,” she replied, simmering. Though there was a hint of a smile in her eyes.

“Okay, so, hell is other people,” I repeated, pretending that I wanted to get down to the assignment, even though I just wanted to put my face on her face. I wanted to kiss her lips and nuzzle her neck and bite her cheeks and do other borderline creepy things. “Does that mean my hell is seeing myself through your eyes, as some sort of rat bastard?”

She immediately scowled at me. “No,” she said sternly, and then her expression softened. “I don’t see you as a rat bastard, Finn.”

“I know, I was kidding.”

“If anything, the way you see me is…” She trailed off, leaving me wondering about the end of that sentence. Before I could ask her to continue, I noticed she looked sad.

“What’s wrong?” I asked impotently—in the sense of feeling useless, not… you know…

“Why did you say that?” she said, hiding her face in her hands.

“Why did I say what?”

“Why did you say that I was beautiful? I… I can’t—”

“How could that possibly be what’s upsetting you right now?” I was hopelessly confused by this girl. More so than other girls.

I mean, I’d had my share of verbal missteps with Stacey. She’d ask how she looked and I’d say, “Great,” only apparently that wasn’t good enough. As it turned out, if I looked at her before I said it, then it meant I had to think about it, and that was bad; and if I didn’t look at her before I said it, then how could I even know how she looked, and that was bad. It was a no-win situation.

But this, I didn’t get. How did I fuck this up?

“Because my whole life I’ve seen myself a certain way—through the eyes of others, I suppose—and then you tell me something that goes completely against my self-image and I just, I can’t process that!” She put her hands through her hair and started tugging at it, so I figured that was a good time to intervene.

“Hey,” I said sharply, snapping her out of it. “Do you want to go for a walk? Get some fresh air?”

She looked at me sadly and nodded.

***

“So…” I said as we walked in the direction of the nearest park. “Can I just ask? Who was the fuckwad who made you think you weren’t beautiful?”

“Tyler Piston,” she said, like she’d had the name on the tip of her tongue for a while now.

“Who is that? Can I punch him?”

“He was a kid from a maths competition when I was ten, and no, you can’t,” she said.

“I feel like there’s a story that goes with this,” I said. I noticed a bench nearby and sat down. “Go on.”

“I didn’t meet a lot of people my own age, being homeschooled and moving around all the time,” she explained as she sat next to me. “So my dad would enter me in open competitions, for maths, debate, all sorts of stuff, and I hated it. But that’s beside the point. This one competition—”

“A maths competition,” I said, nodding to indicate I was paying attention.

“Yes, this maths competition, in the break before the winner was announced, all the kids got to play on the playground because we were in a school, only it was the weekend so there were no students, just us homeschooled kids. And I’m just standing in the sidelines, minding my own business, when this kid, Tyler Piston, comes up to me and sneers, ‘You’re chunky!’ before marching away.”

“What?” I said when I realized that was the end of the story. “That’s horrible.”

It wasn’t that Rae was slender by any means—her voluptuousness was part of the allure, to be fair—but “chunky” is such a mean-spirited word. I almost couldn’t believe someone would do that, except that I’d seen that sort of thing happen with my own eyes as a kid—and even as a near-adult, frankly.

“Okay, it’s not like that single event shaped my entire self-image, but it’s the example that’s stuck with me all these years,” she said. “No one ever told me I was beautiful—or, rather, no one who wanted to kiss me ever told me that.”

“Had you never kissed anyone before?” I asked, suddenly feeling self-conscious about the possibility of being her first kiss, in which case if I had known I would have chosen a better place than that stinking log.

“No one that I liked,” she said with a hint of a smile on her face as she stared down at the ground ahead of her.

I wasn’t sure what to say to that, so I pulled out my camera—which I brought with me everywhere—and took some photos of a nearby tree that was an interesting shape. “Hold on,” I said without looking at her. “I’ll be right back.”

I got up to go get some different angles of the tree, leaving her sitting on the bench by herself for a minute. When I looked back, she was still staring at the ground, so I snapped a photo while she wasn’t paying attention. She looked adorably introspective.

“Get anything good?” she asked when I returned a moment later.

I sat down and scrolled through the photos on my camera. “Yeah, look at this one,” I said, showing her one of the gnarled tree branches. I kept scrolling until I reached the one of her. “And this one.”

“Finn!” she said, hitting me on the arm with the back of her hand.

“Ow,” I said with a laugh. “What?”

“I told you I don’t like pictures of me.”

“But look, you showed up. You’re not a vampire.”

“I know, but I look…”

“Beautiful?”

“Chunky,” she said, like it was an indisputable fact that _chunky_ was the opposite of _beautiful_.

“Believe what you will,” I said, “but I find you utterly irresistible, my dear.”

“Now you’re just mocking me.”

I placed my hand over my heart and swore it to be true, which made her laugh.

“Should we maybe go back to your house, now?” she said once her laughter had quieted.

“Sure.”

I put my camera back in its case and stood up, but just as I was about to start walking I felt her hand touch mine. I looked back at her and she smiled shyly, so I squeezed her hand and we walked back to my house like that.


	8. Chapter 8

Rae and I held hands all the way back to my house, where I let go upon arrival because suddenly the idea of holding hands indoors seemed somewhat nefarious. Out in the world it was just a little harmless PDA, but in the privacy of my home, it could possibly lead to harder things—in a manner of speaking—and I didn’t want to give her the wrong impression about me.

“So…” I said, shoving my hands in my pockets because now I had no idea what to do with them. “Kitchen?”

“Unless you’d rather work in here,” she said. “The couch looks more comfortable than the kitchen chairs, and we’re just brainstorming right now, aren’t we?”

“Um, yeah, okay.”

We went to the kitchen to grab our books and bring them out to the front room where we set them on the coffee table in front of us as we sat down side by side. Well, she sat down first, and then I sat down immediately next to her, even though I could have taken the end and left a reasonable gap between us. But I didn’t want a gap between us. I wanted to feel the side of her thigh against the side of mine, and even through three layers of material—her leggings, her skirt, and my jeans—I could feel her warmth radiating off her.

“Hell is other people,” I said, as if I actually wanted us to get to work on the assignment.

My hands rested in my lap as she leaned forward and picked up her copy of _Huis Clos_ off the table. It looked different from mine, so I asked about it.

“This is my own book,” she explained. “I read it last year, when I was in France.” She flipped it open, then snapped it shut again and set it back on the table. “You know, I could probably write the whole essay myself,” she added. I worried that she meant she wanted to leave now.

“I can’t let you do that,” I said, as though it offended my morality.

“I can at least do the outline at home,” she said. “That way we can do something else now.”

“Something else?” I asked, feigning ignorance. I mean, I _thought_ I knew what she was getting at, but I could never be sure with her. I watched as she methodically removed her leather jacket and placed it next to her before turning her attention back towards me.

“So…” she said, placing her hand on top of mine. “Where were we?”

I was right; hand-holding was like a gateway drug. It lead to finger-interlacing and furtive glances, and then kissing and more kissing and more kissing, until—

My dad walked through the front door, startling both of us. The distraction caused Rae to realize that she was supposed to be home twenty minutes ago, so she quickly packed up her things, said hello to my dad, and left.

“So,” he said to me once she was gone. “New girlfriend?”

“I guess,” I muttered, still angry at him for interrupting.

“Well, good. I’m glad to see you moving on from She Who Shall Not Be Named,” he said.

“You can say her name,” I said. “God, you’re so weird.”

***

Over the next week, Rae came over almost every day after school to “work on the assignment.” Really, I felt kind of bad that she was doing most of the actual work at home by herself, but she insisted she didn’t mind. Besides, she seemed to have a better grasp of the concepts—and the language—than I did.

At school, however, nothing had changed. She hung around our group with me, but none of our behaviour hinted that we were… whatever we were. Not until, one day, I came up to her while she was talking to Archie before school started and I kissed her on the cheek.

“Finn!” she squawked, pushing me away.

“What?” I asked seriously. Archie was looking at us with his eyebrows up, but I didn’t care.

“You can’t just do that,” she said.

“Why not?”

“One, you startled me,” she said, “and two, people can see us!”

“So?” I said. “It’s not like I was feeling you up.”

“I’m sorry, what’s going on here?” asked Archie.

“Rae and I have been _an item_ for the past week, but apparently she’s ashamed to be seen with me or something,” I said to him.

“That’s not it,” she insisted.

“Then what is it?”

“I just… don’t like PDA.”

“Not even mild PDA?” I said.

She shook her head.

“Then how come you held my hand at the park?”

“That wasn’t at school,” she said.

“So, what, you don’t want people at school to know we’re together?” I asked.

“Too late, I know,” said Archie.

“You don’t count as people,” I said. That made Rae laugh a little.

“It’s not that I don’t want people to know,” she said. “I just don’t want to advertise it.”

I didn’t quite understand.

Stacey always wanted to make a big production out of the fact that we were dating. Making out in the halls at school. Holding onto my arm everywhere we went. Introducing me to people as her Boyfriend with a capital B. “He’s not only good-looking, but he’s smart, too!” she’d tell people, so that they wouldn’t have to talk to me to figure that out, I suppose.

“Okay,” I said to Rae. “Whatever you want.”

***

Despite the secrecy surrounding our relationship at school, I could tell that Rae liked me because she kept coming over to my house even after the essay had been submitted. (I ended up writing about a paragraph and a half of it; the rest was all her.)

“Do you want to see something cool?” I asked her when we got to my house one afternoon.

“Something cool?” she said, hanging up her jacket on the hook by the door.

“Yeah, it’s upstairs,” I said.

She looked at me skeptically but said, “Sure,” and I led her up the staircase by her hand. “What is it?” she asked once we were up in my room.

“Huh,” I said, flopping down onto my unmade bed. “I don’t remember. Oh well.”

“I see.” She stood with her hand on her hip, so I sat up and reached my arms out for her.

“Get over here,” I said.

“Why?” she said as she made her way towards me.

“Because I want to deflower you,” I teased, putting my arms around her.

“That is gross and sexist and not even applicable,” she said as she pushed my shoulders, forcing me to lay back.

I pulled her down on top of me. “It’s not?” I asked.

“You didn’t _discover_ me, Nelson,” she said, tucking her hair behind her ear to keep it from falling in my face.

“But you said you’d never kissed anyone you actually liked before.”

“I’m not saying all my choices have been good ones.”

“I’m sorry,” I said, since I didn’t know what to say. It kind of hurt me to know that I wasn’t the first—not because I thought of her as _used goods_ or anything, but because it sounded like her first wasn’t someone who cared for her the way I did.

“Yeah, well…” she said, avoiding my gaze.

“Rae, I think—I mean, I can’t know for sure because I’ve never felt this way before—but I think I’m falling in love with you,” I said as I tucked her hair back into place when it started slipping.

“Finn…”

“What…”

“We’ve known each other for barely a month,” she said.

“So?” I asked. I didn’t see what time had to do with the feeling in my heart—or, more accurately, my brain making me think that I felt something in my heart-and-stomach area in general.

“So, it’s too soon for that kind of thing,” she answered.

“And what would be an appropriate timeline, then?”

“I don’t know,” she said, sitting down on the bed next to me. “Never, maybe.”

I sat up and tucked my legs up onto the bed so that I could kneel in front of her. “How do you expect me to never fall in love with you?” I asked.

“No one else ever has,” she said.

“Maybe you just didn’t give them a chance to.”

She smiled a little, reluctantly, like she knew that I was probably right.

“Come on,” I said. “Let me in.”

She raised an eyebrow at me and I realized that my hands were on her knees, holding her legs open in front of me.

“That’s not what I meant!” I added quickly, lifting my hands in the air. “I just meant like—”

“I know what you meant,” she said. She was still smiling a little. “Come here.”

She hooked her finger into the neckline of my t-shirt and pulled me towards her. I had to put my hands down on either side of her to hold myself up. She kissed me again as she slid down onto her back beneath me, her legs spread open so I could fit between them. Her skirt was riding up her legging-clad thighs.

I lowered myself onto her, hoping that I was not misinterpreting what was happening and that she wouldn’t mind what was going on in my trouser area. As it turned out, she didn’t seem to mind at all. In fact, she even started pushing herself against me. I sat up on my knees to lift my shirt off over my head.

“Can we get under the covers?” she asked, nodding towards the crumpled duvet at the foot of the bed.

“Uh, yeah, sure,” I said. I didn’t really like being under the covers as I got too sweaty, but I wasn’t about to fuck this up by complaining.

I pulled the duvet over us and she started to undress under it, so I did, too. She was much more adept than I was, though. I tossed my jeans onto the floor and turned to face her. She still had her bra on—like we were characters in a film for adolescents—when she turned to face me as well.

“So…”

“So…”

I put my hand on her side and she pressed herself closer to me as I kissed her. My hand trailed down her side to her leg and back up the front of her thigh, where I felt something strange. Lots of raised lines, in a seemingly haphazard formation. So I stopped and looked at her inquisitively.

She rolled away from me onto her back and held the duvet tight around her so that all I could see were her head and shoulders and arms. “I should probably tell you something,” she said seriously, staring up at the ceiling.

I tried to brace myself for whatever it could be, but I didn’t know how. “Okay,” I said.

“The reason I came back here, why I moved from France…” she began, though she stopped mid-thought and started a new one. “I did something stupid and I spent the summer in a mental ward here in Lincolnshire.”

I could feel my eyebrows pull together in the middle as I tried to express my concern. “What did you do?”

“The scars on my legs,” she said, “they were no accident.”

“You mean…?”

“I couldn’t feel anything, Finn.” She sounded choked up. “I wanted to feel something. I wanted to feel pain because I thought I deserved pain. I know that doesn’t make sense—”

“No,” I said, turning onto my back and staring at the ceiling as well. “It makes perfect sense to me.”


	9. Chapter 9

“It does?” said Rae. I could see her turn her head to look at me with my peripheral vision. Before my vision started to get blurry.

Was I crying? I didn’t think I knew how to cry. I didn’t even remember crying when my mum…

But I could feel tears stinging my eyes. I blinked to get rid of them, but that only made them dribble down the sides of my head to my ears. I used the back of my hand to wipe them off, which just sort of spread the dampness around my face. I was hopeless at this.

“Finn, are you okay?” She was leaning over me and put her hand on my chest. “Are you that upset about what I did? Because I’m fine now, honest.”

I shook my head. As much as it did upset me to hear what she had done to herself—or at least hear the allusion to what she had done—that wasn’t what had me that upset.

The thing is, I’ve never really believed in the idea that a person can forget traumatic things, that memories like that can be suppressed. I can understand forgetting unimportant or even mildly annoying things, but anything all that terrible is easy to remember.

I remembered getting dumped by Stacey—not that that was traumatic, just frustrating—and I remembered breaking my arm by getting pushed down a hill when I was eleven. I even remember what happened to my mum when I was seven, which was perhaps the most traumatizing thing that had ever happened to me.

What I didn’t remember, however, was how I’d dealt with it.

It was October of 2007, and I was seven years old. I was walking home from the park with my mum, and I kept kicking this rock that I’d found on the sidewalk. I’d kick it, and it would end up a few paces ahead of me, and then I’d kick it again. It was endlessly entertaining.

At one point, I kicked the rock so hard that it went flying into the road. We lived on a quiet, one-way street and I never really thought twice about running into the road if my football went too far. So I didn’t even think to stop and look for vehicles this time. It wasn’t until I heard my mum scream my name that I even noticed the car. By the time I saw it, however, it was no longer barreling towards me.

I remember the whole scene. The way the car swerved to avoid hitting me. The way my mother had begun running towards me. The way the car pinned her against a tree.

And then there were people. It felt like millions of them, but probably less than a dozen. And there was screaming. And at some point there were emergency vehicles. And I stood there watching. And I didn’t cry.

All of that, I remembered. I’d always remembered. I would, as far as I knew, always remember.

The memory that managed to escape my clutches for ten years, though, was that of me sitting in my room some time shortly after that event. It could have been the next day, the next week, the next month. I wasn’t sure. But I was sitting in my room, on the floor, in my underwear. I’d stolen a book of matches from my dad’s desk and had taught myself how to light them. And so there I sat, lighting these matches.

And then I let the lit matches fall onto my bare legs.

Every burn, every sting, was a reminder of what I had done. A reminder that it was supposed to be me. I was the one who ran into the road, I was the one. It was my fault.

Eventually, my dad found me and yelled at me for playing with matches and ruining the carpet—he’d have to replace it. And that was it. We never talked about it again.

“Finn…” Rae said after I told her. She had that eyebrows-pulled-up-in-the-middle look of concern on her face.

“I may have forgotten the part with the matches until now,” I said, “but I never forgot the guilt.”

“It wasn’t your fault,” she added, squeezing my forearm in a reassuring manner.

“If I hadn’t run into the road like that, the driver never would have swerved, and—”

“It was an accident.”

“Still, it’s possible to be responsible for an accident,” I said. I wasn’t crying anymore. I just felt sick.

“Maybe you need to see a counsellor,” she said after a minute.

“Why?”

“To work this out,” she said. “To stop blaming yourself.”

I sat up and swung my legs over the side of the bed, bracing my now aching head with my hands. “I’m fine,” I said.

And I was, wasn’t I? The guilt I felt hadn’t consumed my life. It gnawed away at me, sure, but I still went to school, I still had friends, I had a whole life. It wasn’t stopping me.

I told Rae this but she didn’t seem convinced.

“If it’s gnawing away at you, eventually it’s going to stop you. There will be nothing left,” she said.

“I’m fine,” I repeated. “And you need to get home, anyway. Your mother will be worried.”

***

I went to school the next day, like I was fine. Because I was fine.

It didn’t matter that I’d just cried in front of the girl that I loved, naked. It didn’t matter that I’d just remembered a traumatizing incident from my past. Nothing mattered.

I went to school, but I wasn’t really there. I sat with my friends at lunch, but I wasn’t really there. I went home at the end of the day and sat in my room, but I wasn’t really there.

I wasn’t really anywhere.

Maybe I hadn’t really been anywhere in a long time. Because nothing was different. I still took notes in my classes, I still laughed at the same stupid jokes at lunch, I still took photos of anything and everything. But I wasn’t there. I was outside myself, watching me do all these things as though everything was normal.

If that was the case—if everything was, in fact, normal—then what did that say about me? About how I’d been living my life? I felt broken, but I behaved in exactly the same way as I always had; was I always broken? Was that my _normal_?

At the very least, behaving the same as always meant that nobody would know that inside I was broken.

Or so I thought.

***

“Hey,” Archie said to me after school one day. He’d jogged to catch up to me as I was leaving to go home.

“Hey,” I said, slowing down a little so as not to seem like I was rushing off rudely.

“We were all going to go meet Chop at the pub tonight,” he said. “You coming?”

“Uh, maybe,” I said, though I wasn’t sure I felt up for an evening of pretending everything was fine in front of people. I just wanted to go home and pretend everything was fine alone.

“Okay,” he said, but he didn’t seem convinced. “Look, can we talk for a minute?”

“Sure,” I said.

He looked around at all the people leaving the school grounds. “Not here. My house?” he said.

I nodded uncertainly and walked with him the three blocks to his house—closer than mine, otherwise we probably would have gone there. “What did you want to talk about, exactly?” I asked when we got inside.

“Um, you should probably sit down, I think. Yeah, sit down,” he said, motioning towards the couch. He took the neighbouring armchair. “So, I talked to Rae,” he began.

I inhaled sharply, like someone had just dropped an ice cube down the back of my shirt. I didn’t like where this was going.

“And I asked—I was concerned about you, Finn,” he said. “So I asked what was going on with you lately. I figured she would know best, being your girlfriend and all.”

“Nothing’s going on with me,” I said.

“You’ve been acting weird. Hollow,” he continued. “She said it had something to do with your mother, but wouldn’t give me more details.”

“My mother’s been dead for ten years,” I replied flatly. _Nine years, eleven months, and twenty-three days,_ I thought to myself.

“Yeah, but that shit’s still gotta hurt, right?”

“I haven’t been acting weird,” I said, ignoring his last comment. “And I’m not hollow, I’m—”

“Absent? AWOL? Missing the spark that made you Finn?” he offered.

“I’m fine.”

“ _He said hollowly_.”

“What is this about, exactly?” I asked with impatience.

“That’s what I’m trying to find out,” he said.

“I told you, I’m fine. Nothing’s going on,” I said, and then added quietly, “Wait, are people talking about me?”

“Well…”

“Arch?”

“Yeah, kind of,” he said. “We’re just concerned about you. You’ve been a bit distant lately.”

“I don’t feel any different.” Or at least, I didn’t feel like I felt any different. “Maybe I’ve always been distant, and you’re just noticing now,” I said.

He shook his head. “This, this isn’t you. Rae says that she suggested you talk to someone, like a counsellor, and I’m wondering if maybe she has a point.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“You’re acting like you did when it happened, Finn!” he said loudly, not quite yelling. “I remember when it happened, and you got weird and distant and we weren’t friends for like a year—not really, anyway—and I don’t want it to be like that again. So just, please, for the love of God, talk to somebody!”

I was, admittedly, shocked by this outburst and information. “Were we really not friends for a year?” I asked meekly.

“Pretty much,” he said.

“Okay,” I said, taking a deep breath. “I’ll think about it.”


	10. Chapter 10

I stayed at Archie’s house for dinner—he agreed to skip the pub tonight and just hang with me—and played video games until I decided I should get home. I didn’t have a set curfew, but I liked to chill out by myself before I went to bed anyway.

I was surprised to see my dad watching telly when I got home. “I thought you had a thing tonight,” I said to him as I flopped into the old recliner next to the fireplace. By “thing,” he knew I meant “date,” but the idea of one of your parents going on a date is just creepy, to say the least, so I’d rather not say it at all.

“Cancelled,” he said without turning his attention from the television.

“Oh, sorry,” I said. “I mean for not calling to say I was going to be late. I thought you were out, so—”

“It’s all right,” he said. “I assume you weren’t out doing heroin or getting anyone pregnant. I mean, I hope you weren’t out doing those things, but—”

“I wasn’t.”

“I’m just saying, use a condom.”

“Jeez, dad, enough.”

“And don’t do heroin. But if you do do heroin, don’t share needles,” he said. “But don’t do heroin.” He still had yet to look at me during this entire interaction.

“Got it,” I said. I could tell he was trying to be funny, but we both knew I never laughed at his jokes. Neither of us said anything for a good six minutes before I added, “I’m thinking of seeing a counsellor.”

He finally stopped watching whatever was on and looked at me. “A counsellor,” he repeated, not quite a question.

“You know, for my brain,” I said.

“Okay…” He seemed a bit confused and worried.

“Well, ‘cause, like, since mum died,” I continued as nonchalantly as I could, “I’ve blamed myself and that’s apparently broken my brain, and my friends are all concerned and think I should talk to someone. Like a counsellor.”

“You blamed yourself?”

“Well, yeah.” I tried to make it seem that this was a casual conversation topic, that I wasn’t on the verge of super unmanly tears. “Didn’t you?”

He looked pained, like I’d just put a blade through his ribcage. “Are you asking if I blamed you for your mother’s death?”

I swallowed hard. “Yeah,” was all I managed to squeeze out of my throat.

“Christ, Finn, no! Jesus. No, Finn, I didn’t,” he said, shaking his head in disbelief.

“Then why…” (Oh, God, this was so silly, I could hardly believe I was about to say it.) “Why didn’t you hug me?”

“What? I’ve hugged you, Finn.”

“When I burned myself when I was seven,” I explained. “You yelled at me for playing with matches, but I was hurt and you didn’t hug me.”

“Jesus, Finn, is that what this is all about?” he asked. “You want to talk to a counsellor because I didn’t _hug_ you enough? I’ll hug you right now if that’ll fix everything.”

I stood up quickly. I wasn’t about to sit there and let him mock me. “Fuck you,” I muttered as I walked past him to the stairs.

“What did you say to me?”

“You heard me.” I went up to my room and slammed the door shut, like I was a child throwing a tantrum—which, I suppose, I was.

I’d never spoken to my dad like that before, but I only felt marginally sorry for it. Mostly, I just felt relieved.

***

In the morning before classes, I grabbed Rae by the arm and asked if she wanted to skip French with me. It took her all of two-point-four seconds to agree and we ran off the grounds before the bell could ring, waving goodbye at Archie as we left.

When the school was no longer in sight, she held onto my hand, and we made our way to her old hiding place by the creek. It was colder now than it had been the first time we went, so we huddled together to keep warm.

“So apparently you’ve been talking to Archie about me,” I said softly into her hair before kissing the top of her head.

“He came to me,” she said as she looked up at me. “He was worried, and to be honest, I didn’t blame him.”

“I know, I’m not angry,” I said. I kissed her head again. “I’ve decided to talk to someone about it.”

“Who?”

“I don’t know yet. A counsellor of some kind, I suppose.” I hadn’t really thought about how I would do that, though. “How do I find a counsellor to talk to?”

“I’d say ask your doctor for a referral,” she said sagely.

“Right. Of course.”

“But if they recommend you to someone named Kester Gill, ask for someone else,” she added.

“Why?”

“Because he’s _my_ therapist and it would be weird if we both were seeing him.”

I chuckled a little. “Yeah, that would be weird.”

“I think it’s a good idea, though. You talking to someone.”

“Yeah,” I said as I stared into the water. _I’m not really here_ , I thought. _I’m floating downstream._

***

I made an appointment to see my physician, Dr. Lorna Shelduck—whose name always made me think of a Shellder crossed with a Psyduck, and reminded me that I played too much Pokémon Go in the summer.

She agreed that it sounded like a good idea for me to talk to someone, and referred me to one of the counsellors who worked in conjunction with her office, Helen Poole. As long as it wasn’t Kester Gill, I was going to be fine, I figured.

I assumed, based on her name— _Helen_ —that she would be old. Older. Forties, fifties. Helen was just such an old-fashioned name. So I was surprised when I got to her office for my appointment and found a woman who couldn’t have been more than twenty-five or so, if that. And she was pretty. The kind of pretty that would have been distracting if I didn’t have a girlfriend. (Okay, it was distracting anyway.)

“Finn,” she said, smiling at me when I walked in. “Have a seat.”

There was an armchair—the same kind as in the waiting room: rough upholstery and wooden arms—next to her desk, which was against a wall. I sat down and she turned her swivel chair to face me, her legs crossed. If I crossed mine, too, then our feet would probably touch. I felt weird for thinking that.

“No couch?” I asked jokingly, and when I saw the look she was giving me, I quickly added, “You know, ‘cause in the movies the person’s always lying on a couch.” I felt stupid as I was talking.

“I’m not a psychiatrist,” she said with a smile.

“Oh. Right. Well.” I didn’t know what to say anymore.

“Would you be more comfortable lying down?” she asked. “Because I’m sure there’s an empty exam room with a table you could lie on, if you like.”

I couldn’t tell if she was being serious or not, so I just said, “No.”

“Okay, so why don’t you tell me why you’re here,” she continued. She didn’t have a notepad out, and she wasn’t poised to take notes at her computer. I glanced at her monitor and it wasn’t even on.

“Um, well,” I began hesitantly, staring down at the carpet. It was hard to say this stuff to a stranger. “I guess it started when my mum died.”

I looked up at her and she wasn’t smiling, but she didn’t say anything. Not even, “I’m sorry for your loss.” She just nodded. It was oddly comforting.

“And so, like, I guess I blamed myself or whatever,” I went on, sounding like a fourteen-year-old girl. “And then I burned myself on purpose and my dad got mad at me and I stopped being friends with my best friend, but I forgot all of this until I felt the scars on my girlfriend’s legs and now I’ve apparently been hollow or something. So, yeah…”

She nodded again and waited a long time to see if I would continue talking before she spoke. “All right,” she said evenly. “But why are you here right now?”

I frowned in confusion. “This was the time of my appointment.”

She gave me one of those smiles that said she was slightly disappointed that I was trying to be funny instead of serious, but I was being serious. “What do you want to talk about with me today?”

“Um, all that stuff I mentioned,” I said.

“Okay.” She laughed a little, but not in a derogatory or diminishing way. “We probably won’t get to all of that today, so why don’t you tell me what’s bothering you the most. What can we do today to make tomorrow easier for you?”

I didn’t even know where to begin. I thought that’s what she was there for, to tell me where to start. “I guess I’d like my friends to stop thinking of me as being hollow,” I said after a minute of staring helplessly at the floor.

“Do you believe you can control what people think of you?” she asked. When I looked at her she had this sincere appearance that made me want to trust her, and also I wanted to cross my legs so that our feet would touch.

“Not exactly, but maybe if I felt less hollow then they would sense it,” I said.

“Okay, so you really want to stop _feeling_ hollow,” she said. “Others’ perception is just a secondary benefit.”

“I suppose.”

“And why do you think you feel hollow?”

“I don’t know.” I shifted in my seat and accidentally wound up crossing my legs, but my foot didn’t quite reach hers.

She watched me for a minute, like she was patiently waiting for me to come up with some brilliant revelation. “How about this,” she finally said, “why don’t you tell me what it means to feel hollow. What does that feel like for you?”

“I don’t know,” I repeated. “I mean, I suppose it just feels like I’m not really there. Like I’m outside myself, watching myself go through the motions of life but not living in them.”

“Why is that?”

I shrugged but then tried to venture a guess. “Maybe because I don’t feel like I deserve it.”

“Deserve what?”

“Life. Living.”

“Why not?”

“Because… Because…” _Because it was supposed to be me_ , I thought. And then I did the most embarrassing thing of my life; I started to cry in front of her. It was the second time in less than a month that I’d cried in front of a beautiful woman, and this one was a complete stranger.

I wasn’t sobbing or anything, but I could feel my face contort into an expression of pure anguish as tears rolled down my cheeks. I tried to stop them with the sleeve of my shirt.

“Tissue?” she said, offering me one from the box on her desk. I took it to be polite—I figured she probably thought it was gross that I was wiping it all on my sleeve.

I couldn’t see a bin to toss it in when I was done, but she reached under her desk and pulled one out for me. In that moment, I decided something; counselling was not for me.


	11. Chapter 11

“How did it go?” Rae asked when I got to school.

I shrugged because I didn’t want to talk about it in front of Archie. Even though he knew I’d gone to see a counsellor. I just didn’t like him thinking of me as broken. Vulnerable.

He must have sensed this, because he stood up and said, “Well, I need to get to class early, so I’m just gonna…” He pointed towards the school with his thumb and headed off in that direction.

“Really, how did it go?” Rae asked again once he was gone.

“Fine, I guess,” I said. “No, I don’t know. I don’t think it’s right for me. Counselling.”

“Why not?”

“She didn’t really do anything. She just kept asking me questions that, if I knew the answers to them, I wouldn’t even be there in the first place,” I said.

“That’s what she’s supposed to do,” said Rae. “She’s there to help guide you through it. To make you question your reasoning for things so you can break harmful habits.”

“I don’t have any harmful habits,” I argued. “Technically speaking, I’m fine.”

“But you’re not _you_.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“You hardly talk to me anymore,” she said. “And you haven’t invited me over to your house since—”

“Maybe I just don’t want to talk to you anymore, did you think of that?” I said angrily. “Maybe I just wish you’d never told me any of it! Then everything would have stayed the same.”

“So, what, you’d rather not know why my legs are covered in scars? That wouldn’t bother you?”

“Well, if you could just keep your legs shut, I wouldn’t even know now, would I?” I said, though I immediately regretted it.

“You,” she said, standing tall, “are a fucking asshole.”

“Rae, I didn’t mean—” I began, but she was already walking away. I didn’t know what I meant, anyway.

She was right. Maybe I did need counselling after all.

***

“I’m a fucking asshole,” I said as Helen sat facing me in her swivel chair.

“What makes you say that?” she asked, resting her chin on her fist like she was posing for a graduation portrait. She didn’t even blink at my use of profanity.

“My girlfriend said it, actually, but she was right,” I replied. “I’d said something awful to her, and I’d have to be a fucking asshole to say such a thing to someone I care about, wouldn’t I? God, I hope she’s still my girlfriend. She might not be anymore.”

“How come?”

I looked down at the carpet again—there was one spot where it was discoloured and it always drew my attention—because I couldn’t face her when I said this. “Basically, I sort of called her a slut for wanting to have sex with me.”

“Why is that?” she asked evenly. When I finally turned my attention to her again, she didn’t look disgusted or offended; she just looked like she was listening.

I didn’t know where to start. “She has these scars on her legs, see, and I didn’t know that until—well, until we were in bed together, and she told me how she got them, which made me feel bad for her, but then I just felt bad for myself because it reminded me how I’d done something similar, and now thinking about her makes me feel a little sick.”

Once again, she nodded and waited to see if I would continue before speaking. “You say that thinking about her makes you feel sick,” she said. “In what way?”

“I don’t know, kind of like I want to throw up out of embarrassment,” I said.

“You’re embarrassed when you think about her?”

“Kind of. I mean, I cried in front of her.”

Helen smiled a little. “You cried in front of me, too,” she said, like that was supposed to help.

“Yeah, well, I kind of want to throw up out of embarrassment right now,” I said.

“You’re allowed to cry, Finn,” she said.

“But I didn’t cry then.”

“When?”

“When she died.”

“You mean your mother?”

I nodded solemnly.

“That’s okay, too,” she said. “You’re allowed to process things in whatever way is right for you.”

“Yeah, but maybe I didn’t,” I said.

“Didn’t what?”

“Process it.”

She watched me contemplatively for a moment. She really was very pretty, and I felt like a creep for thinking that, for obvious—and numerous—reasons.

“All right, so what makes you think that you haven’t processed your mother’s death?” she finally asked.

“I don’t know. Everything?” I said.

She looked at me like she expected me to continue, so I did.

“I mean, for starters, I dealt with it by dropping lit matches onto my legs—that doesn’t really sound like processing, at least not in a healthy way,” I went on. “And then I bottled that up for ten years only to have it erupt into bouts of crying at the most inopportune times.”

“So, what you’re trying to say is that you’re still _processing_ ,” she said. “You’re in process.”

“Maybe…”

“That’s okay, too, Finn.”

“No, it’s not, because now I’m broken and I’m hollow and I’m an asshole and—” I stopped when I felt myself getting worked up. I looked back at her and realized she was just going to let me continue berating myself until I was tired out; she wasn’t going to argue that I was not any of these things. I didn’t know if that made me feel better or worse. She switched which leg was crossed over the other, and I caught a glimpse up her skirt as she did, which made me feel slightly ashamed.

When it was clear I was not going to keep going, she added, “Do you want to know what I think?”

I wasn’t sure that I did, but I nodded anyway.

“I think that you expect things to just be the way you want them to be all the time,” she said. “You expect your progress here to be linear. That you can isolate the problem and fix it, and fixed it will remain.”

_Well, yeah,_ I thought. Isn’t that how problems work?

“But emotional healing is not linear, Finn.” She said my name softly, like she was trying to ease my pain by proving that she remembered it, rather than saying it harshly to emphasize her point. “You need to give yourself permission to take your time.”

I wasn’t sure I had all that much time. I’d already completely ruined things with Rae. I’d pissed off my dad. Everyone around me was slipping away.

“Can you do that, Finn?” she asked.

“I’ll try…”

***

Rae didn’t talk to me before French class anymore. Or during. Or after.

She didn’t talk to me at lunch, and I could tell the others at the table were taking her side—and they should take her side; I was the jerk. But they still let me sit with them because they knew I was _going through something_.

“Still,” Izzy said at lunch one day, “that’s no excuse for what you said to her.”

Rae was sitting next to her, across the table from me, but was not looking at me. She hadn’t looked at me in a while.

“I know,” I said, stirring the contents of my lunch around the plate without eating any of it. “And I’m sorry—I’ve said that I’m sorry. I don’t know what else I can do.”

“You can’t just throw apologies at something hoping it will go away,” said Izzy.

“Lay off him, Iz,” said Chloe. “He’s trying his best.”

Was I, though? Was I trying my best? Didn’t that just mean that my best wasn’t good enough? That I wasn’t good enough?

Izzy and Chloe started arguing about me—or maybe it was about something else; I wasn’t really paying attention. I just kept staring at Rae. Rae, who wouldn’t look up at me. Rae, who might never speak to me again. And it hurt me to think that, so I looked back down at my mess of a lunch.

“I’ll do anything,” I finally said to her, though it probably seemed like I was saying it to my mashed potatoes. “Just tell me what you want me to do,” I said louder after getting no response.

“I don’t know!” she said, breaking her long-held silence towards me. “I don’t know, because what you said was just so hurtful that I can’t imagine why you would say it unless you wanted to hurt me. In which case, how can I be with someone who does that?

“And I know you’re hurting, too, and maybe you just wanted someone else to hurt for a change, and I get that,” she continued, “but I don’t want to be your punching bag.”

“That’s not—I mean, I didn’t—I wasn’t trying to hurt you,” I said desperately.

She looked at me with a pained expression. “That just makes it worse, I think,” she said. “That you could be so careless, to not even realize that saying something like that would hurt me.”

“I realized it as I was saying it, if that helps,” I said, feeling completely worthless.

“I need to go finish some homework,” she said as she stood up from her seat. She grabbed her bag and slung it over her shoulder. “See you guys tomorrow.”

I started to stand as well, like I should follow her, but Izzy said, “Let her go, Finn. She needs time.”

Time. Everything takes so much damn time.


	12. Chapter 12

I tried to give Rae time. But the more time I gave, the more it felt like I was just letting her wash away. (Hope, doubt, uncertainty.)

I tried to give myself time, too, but things felt so urgent. I needed to get my friends to like me again. I needed to get Rae to like me again. I needed to do well on my exams. These things couldn’t wait for me to non-linearly heal.

I tried to tell that to Helen, but she just smiled in that way she does that suggests she cares about my pain but not too much.

“There’s no magic fix-it button,” she said. “If there were it would make my job a whole lot easier.” She laughed gently, like she was trying to cheer me up while remaining sensitive to my troubles.

I didn’t know how she could do that. How she could listen so intently and care just the right amount.

And she was just so pretty. Her pulchritude became increasingly intrusive as my sessions continued. Every time she crossed and uncrossed her legs, I would catch a glimpse of her thigh and lose my train of thought. One time she leaned forward in her seat as part of her intent listening, and I could see down her blouse. I completely forgot what I was saying and started talking about football, and she just smiled like my change in topics was amusing.

I felt terrible for thinking this—technically I still had a girlfriend, maybe, and also Helen was several years older than me, and also she was my counsellor. It was all just very wrong.

But it wasn’t like she was doing anything in particular to make me think these things. She wasn’t sending me signals or anything like that. She was very professional. Which kind of made it that much harder not to think about her. Luckily for me, there was nothing remotely sexy about her office, so I didn’t fantasize about doing anything with her in there. (Maybe if she’d had one of those couches, though…)

But I may or may not have spent some nights in my room thinking over possible scenarios in my mind. For instance, I might run into her out in the world somewhere, say at a coffee shop, and I would say hi first—because she told me she wouldn’t acknowledge me in public unless I chose to greet her first, for confidentiality reasons—and she would say hi back, and I would ask her how she was doing, like we were old friends, and invite her to sit with me since all the other tables were full. And when she crosses her legs under the table, her foot actually would touch me, but she wouldn’t move it and I wouldn’t say anything and it would just be our secret. In fact, how we met one another would be our secret, as well. No one around us would have to know. And when it starts raining, I would offer to drive her home, because she had walked here, and she would say, “It’s too much trouble,” and I would say, “It’s no trouble at all.” So then I’d drive her home and she’d sit in the still car like she was waiting for something and then turn to me and say something like, “Do you want to come in for some coffee?” and I’d reply with a laugh, “I just had coffee.” Then she would unfasten her seatbelt and lean over to whisper in my ear, “There’s more than just coffee,” or something better than that because she’s probably way more clever than I am. And I would try to kiss her right then, but she would push herself away and say, “Not out here,” looking around even though there’s no one out and about because it’s raining. So I would follow her into her house and—

“Are you all right, Finn?” Helen asked me with concern. “You looked kind of zoned out.”

“Uh, yeah,” I said, trying to get my eyes to focus on the room around me. Apparently I thought about possible scenarios while I was in session, too. “I’m fine, I just, um, like you said, I zoned out.”

“Do you often have trouble concentrating?” she asked. She leaned forward again and I shifted my gaze to the ground.

“Not really,” I said. “Just sometimes.”

When I looked at her again, she was still leaning forward and watching me like she expected me to keep talking. She stayed like that for a while before sitting up straight. “Okay, well, we can talk about that more next time, if you like,” she said. She smiled again and for a second I wondered if maybe she only smiled like that for me.

***

But I had more important things to think about than my counsellor’s smile—such as school and, oh yeah, my _girlfriend_.

My girlfriend who hadn’t really spoken to me in weeks. My girlfriend who may not even have been my girlfriend anymore. (My life was abysmally pathetic. Or pathetically abysmal.)

I’d given up trying to make her talk to me. I was giving her time, like Izzy had suggested. But I felt like time was running out. Soon she was going to meet some other guy, some guy who wasn’t a self-involved asshole with a weird crush on his counsellor. Sure, perhaps that guy would be better for her than I would, but I wanted her more. I had to want her more. I wanted her so much that it was physically impossible for anyone to want her more than I did. My overactive imagination in regards to other women notwithstanding, Rae was the one I wanted most.

I _loved_ her, and that had to count for something, right?

It was possible, however, that it didn’t. For, it wasn’t as though she’d ever said that she loved me. Perhaps her feelings about me were as trivial as my feelings about Helen. Temporary. Transient. Ephemeral.

_Hell is other people_ ; what a joke. Hell is me. My life was hell, not because of other people or their perceptions of me, but because of my assholery towards them. (Or is this what Sartre meant? I never did quite understand that play.)

I didn’t deserve Rae. I didn’t deserve Archie or any of them. I didn’t deserve anything.

_It was supposed to be me._

***

Memory is a strange thing. Or so goes the lyric from my mother’s favourite song, “Enid,” as that was her name.

_Enid, we never really knew each other anyway._

I suppose that was true. I mean, how well can you really know your own parents? If they disappear while you are still a child, you never really got a chance to know them at all. And they never got to know you, not the person you were to become.

My mother didn’t know who I was—she knew me as that seven-year-old who liked to kick rocks and footballs, who liked going to school and playing with my best friend, Archie. She didn’t know what I had become. This demon haunting all those unlucky enough to cross my path.

She didn’t know that, when she died, a part of me died, too. And I just had to keep on living, missing a piece of myself, until the hole it left got too big and there was nothing left. And I snapped.

It wasn’t fair, I thought. She’d never done anything to deserve such a fate. I was the careless one. I was too self-involved to notice the world around me, and she got punished for it. It didn’t make any sense. It was supposed to be me.

I can hardly even remember her, sometimes. Not that I don’t remember her, that’s not what I mean. But I don’t remember what she was like. I’m not sure I even remember what she looked like; I’ve just seen enough photos that I rebuilt that memory. But it’s not a real memory. I have hardly any real memories of her.

Just vague things, like the way she would sing while she was vacuuming. I don’t recall what sort of songs she would sing, though. I guess she thought that the sound of the vacuum would drown out her voice, but it didn’t. I do the opposite now. I put headphones on when I vacuum so I can drown out the noise.

Sometimes I would stand downstairs next to the fireplace where I could see the framed photo of my mum that was taken before I was born. Before my parents were even married. She wasn’t that much older than I am now in the photo. And I would stand there and think about how this young woman was not going to make it to thirty, and how sad that was.

“You took this photo, right?” I asked my dad. (I had already apologized for swearing at him, and he had apologized for making me think that he blamed me for ten years.) (It wasn’t great but it was a place to start.)

“A few years before you were born, yeah,” he replied when he looked up from his book and saw which photo I was examining.

“She always liked this one, didn’t she?” I said, picking it up by the metal frame.

“One of the few photos of her she’d allow me to keep out,” he said. “I think she liked that it was natural, candid. She didn’t look posed. God, she hated posing for photos.”

I smiled sadly as I set the photo back on the mantle. “So does Rae,” I said, mostly to myself. And then I got an idea.


	13. Chapter 13

Nothing good ever happened to me. That was my problem. Or so I believed.

As it turned out, I never did anything good for others, either, and that was probably worse. And that was something I could control. Rather than sit around and wait for something good to happen to me, I was going to do something good for someone else.

I walked up to Rae before school with a package under my arm. She’d taken to reading under the Y-shaped tree before class instead of hanging with Archie, probably because she wanted to be nice and let me have him, like he was the dog in our divorce.

“Hi,” I said as I took a seat on the cold ground next to her.

“Hi,” she said without looking up from her book. She wasn’t completely freezing me out, which was nice, but it wasn’t quite a warm greeting.

“I have something for you,” I said, holding up the wrapped package in front of her.

She glanced at it for a second. “I don’t want a present from you. I’m still angry.”

“I know, and I don’t expect this to make everything okay,” I said. “I just want you to have it.”

She shoved her book in her bag and took the package from my hand. “What is it?” she asked.

“Open it.”

With a sigh, she unwrapped it to reveal a vintage wooden frame with a photo inside. It was the photo of her sitting at the park, when she didn’t know I was taking her picture. “What—Why would you give me this?” she asked. She didn’t sound angry, just uncertain. (Doubtful, hopeful.)

“I wanted to give you a chance to see yourself the way I see you,” I said. “Lovely and contemplative. I mean, I know I’m not the world’s best photographer, but I really like this one because you look like you.”

“It’s a nice picture, Finn, but—”

“It doesn’t make up for what I said to you, I know. I’m truly sorry about that, and I don’t expect you to forgive me, but please know it wasn’t my intention to hurt you,” I said, looking down at my shoes. “I don’t know why I said it—maybe I was trying to be quippy but I was too angry for quip. I’m not sure. But I didn’t mean it. I one thousand percent didn’t mean it.”

“I just don’t get how you could say you’re falling in love with me one minute and then tell me _that_ ,” she said.

“I know, it’s horrible. And, not that this is an excuse, but I’ve spent the past ten years thinking that I deserve to be dead, so that’s sort of skewed my ability to gauge what is and is not an appropriate reaction to things,” I said. “It’s like I do awful things on purpose to give grounds for why I deserve to be dead, you know?”

“That’s a terrible justification for your actions.”

“I’m not trying to justify them, just—I just want to explain that my dickishness doesn’t come from a place of evil. It’s not like I _want_ to be this way, and I’m trying to change.”

“You are?”

“I’m still seeing a counsellor. A new counsellor.” (I’d asked my doctor for a new referral since I was too distracted with the first one.)

“Oh,” she said. “I thought you gave up on that.”

“I went back. Because you told me I was a fucking asshole, and I agreed with you,” I said.

She cracked a bit of a smile.

“And you deserve better than that,” I continued. “I want to be better than that. I want to be good enough for you, Rae.”

“Well,” she said, holding up the photo, “this is a start.”

***

Something good happened to me.

In fact, lots of good somethings happened to me all my life. Sure, terrible things happened, too, but that’s true for everyone. My terrible things might be worse than some people’s and not as bad as others, but they don’t negate the good things that happen. And vice versa. Life is the good and the bad combined.

“How very profound of you,” said Rae when I told her my new philosophy.

“Are you mocking me?” I asked, squeezing her around her middle.

“Only a little,” she said. She turned and lifted her head so she could kiss me.

“I know it sounds obvious,” I said when she settled back against my shoulder. “But that doesn’t mean it’s easy to live that way. It takes practice.”

“No, you’re right.” She patted me on my bare chest in a patronizing way that made me laugh.

I nestled my face into her hair and felt… happy. And I knew it wasn’t a permanent state of happiness, but that was okay. I was collecting happy moments, that’s all. Taking a snapshot in my mind.

“So, tell me,” I said, “where’s your favourite place you’ve ever been?”

She had already told me about how she’d lived all over the world—how her father took her with him whenever he moved for work to try and broaden the scope of her education. “Here,” she said after thinking on it for a moment.

“Here?” I wasn’t sure how this could be her favourite place, considering how she moved back with her mother because of her own terrible thing that happened.

“Don’t get me wrong, I’ve lived in some really lovely places,” she continued. “But I feel home here, now. Right here.”

“In my bed, you mean?” I teased.

“In your arms,” she said.

I couldn’t help but smile a little, whether she was joking or not.

Something good happened to me; Rae forgave me. Which made me realize that maybe it was okay for me to forgive myself, too. That maybe I didn’t need to torment myself with guilt for the rest of my life. That maybe I was actually allowed to collect happy moments like this one.

“This is my favourite place, too,” I said to her. “Right here.”


End file.
